NO STOP SIGNS, SPEED LIMIT
7 years ago
Watching Team North America fly around the ice like a bunch of hot-wired Ferraris and Lamborghinis at the World Championship of Hockey these last few days has been nothing short of a treat. No more so than Wednesday’s crowd-pleasing 4-3 overtime win over Team Sweden.
It’s been sort of a hockey version of Gone in 60 Seconds so far for Team North America, a thrill ride for fans who’ve been force-fed a lower-octane version of the game in NHL rinks for far too long by teams and coaches favouring systems and drool-inducing defensive play over a pedal-to-the-metal approach. It’s been a flashback to the way the Edmonton Oilers played in the 1980s. What we’re seeing is a rush. What the NHL has served up is more like rush hour.
Captain Connor McDavid and his teammates pumped 49 shots at Henrik Lundqvist in the Team Sweden net. That onslaught came after TNA fired 46 shots versus Team Russia and 43 more against Finland – 138 shots in three games. It’s been a balls-out, attack-first approach that long ago was squeezed out of the NHL game in favour of abominations like the trap and the left-wing lock, shot-blocking and 200-foot hockey as part of stifling defensive schemes.
I get it that NHL coaches don’t have the kind of offensive talent to throw over the boards that TNA bench boss Todd McLellan has at his disposal in this tournament. I get it that NHL coaches don’t get paid to be entertaining, they get paid to win, so they work with the talent they’ve got and make due.
Coaches without that kind of offensive firepower to call on have to find other ways to win or they have to find another line of work. All that’s understood, but, mercy, what I wouldn’t give to see just a little bit of what we’re watching now find its way back into the NHL game sooner rather than later.
TURN THEM LOOSE
As TNA’s head coach, McLellan has had a front-row seat for the displays of speed and skill we’ve witnessed from McDavid, Jack Eichel, Johnny Gaudreau, Nathan MacKinnon, Auston Matthews, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and the rest. Here’s a couple of excerpts from McLellan’s post-game availability after the win over Sweden.
Q. “Todd, from a point of view of being a coach in that kind of a game with that display of speed and that display of skill and that display of excitement, can you even separate yourself from what’s going on and realize that this is one of the greatest hockey games ever played?”
McLELLAN: “No, you can’t. You know what, we were just talking, Dave Tippett has coached probably more games than probably the rest of our staff put together, and we have coaches that have been around for a while, but we became fans. Like I said, I was standing on the bench, no, no, no, and then go, go, go. It was just going back and forth, the energy in the building and the passion with the fans, the players. I’ve seen a lot of excited players, but that bench was very excited. It was a lot of fun.”
Q. “You won two games against two good countries, but the impact that this team has made, we’re all sitting around here talking about the ’80s Oilers and one of the better games we’ve all seen in decades. Did you ever think that you guys could in such a short time have a real imprint on the game like this?”
McLELLAN: “I didn’t. I thought that we could be dangerous. I thought that we could have fun playing as a team. I thought we built the team and played to the identity. We didn’t try and adjust that. But I didn’t think we’d have as big an impact on the hockey world as we have had so far.
And what the young players are learning and what we keep telling them is they’re pretty damned good. They have played well in many different areas. We make mistakes, and we pay for them, but they’re pretty good, and they’re a lot of fun to watch. It’s exciting to be a part of it.”
DARE TO DREAM
The reality is that it’s probably pie-in-the-sky stuff to think that NHL teams could provide the type of offensive entertainment we’ve seen from TNA at the World Cup of Hockey over the course and the grind of an 82-game season — even if they wanted to — for the obvious reasons I mentioned above. Not enough skilled forwards to hang fire. Not even D-men capable of getting them the rubber on the fly.
At the same time, it should be noted that McDavid and the rest of TNA forwards haven’t exactly been facing a bunch of stiffs in this tournament. How good is that Team Sweden blueline? Not exactly the third-pairing in Edmonton or Toronto or Columbus. Couldn’t the majority of top-nine forwards get something done if they were given the green light against your average NHL blueline corps?
In an era when we’ve discussed endless tweaks to the NHL game – ideas like making the nets bigger, shrinking goaltending equipment and even expanding ice surfaces to help boost offense and excitement – TNA has given us a glance at what the game can be and once was on the same old 200-by-85 sheet of ice, with the nets still four-by-six and goaltenders still wearing over-sized equipment.
I don’t know that we can hope to replicate the kind of excitement that TNA has injected back into the game these last few days, but I’d damn sure like to see those overseeing the game, right from minor hockey on up to the NHL, at least contemplate what it might be like to emphasize puck-moving skills, skating and scoring rather than defensive systems as the means to an end – winning games.
If nothing else, I’d like to see McLellan and his NHL peers lean more toward the philosophy of attacking and spend at least as much time at practice figuring out how to score goals as dreaming up new defensive schemes to prevent same, even though they are working without the depth of elite talent we’ve been seeing at this tournament. I bet fans would like that, too.
Listen to Robin Brownlee Wednesdays and Thursdays from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. on the Jason Gregor Show on TEAM 1260.
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